Back in my day, teams bent morality only when there was a pretty good chance we’d forget about it afterward. We didn’t love it back then. We didn’t condone it. We didn’t digest it all that well, either. But when you saw how sad and desperate some of these NFL owners, general managers and coaches were to save their own hides and win football games, you could at least arrive at the series of mental gymnastics that could cause someone to try and short-circuit building with integrity and paint over all those men of character signs in the facility they hung up when they got the job.

Remember four years ago during the Browns’ Deshaun Watson gamble , for example? At the time, it was one of the great experiments in public sentiment, with the theory being that Watson would play so well— as he had largely had until the moment he was signed—that, much like fellow AFC North quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, his sins would become a smaller and smaller paragraph as the story continued to be written .…